'Cultural brokers' _ instrumental in the diffusion of new

International Review of Social History (IRSH), Supplement 2004
Position Paper
concerning the “call for articles”:
Framing Protest:
Popular Intellectuals and Social Movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America
(Nineteenth-Twentieth centuries)
Michiel Baud and Rosanne Rutten
University of Amsterdam
Collective interests and identities, notions of rights and justice, and specific claims and
collective demands are (partly) shaped by the interpretive frames through which people make
sense of the world. This view is quite widely accepted by now, in studies on labor history,
social movements, and popular politics. Hence the current interest in “languages of politics”,
which enable and constrain what can be imagined and said in the political arena; “collective
action frames”, which define specific conditions as unjust and show what collective actors can
do about it;1 popular nationalist discourse that shapes political change on different levels of
society;2 and “languages of class” and “identity stories” that specify and enforce distinctions
between “us” and “them” and create (new) political practices.3
Such ideological frames are produced by people, in social interaction. This process merits
special attention. How this process takes place, by whom, and with what effects on popular
activism (how they enable and constrain collective action), are the issues we want to explore
in this supplement of the IRSH. Placed center stage are the people who create and diffuse such
activist frames, people we have dubbed “popular intellectuals”. Social historians and
anthropologists have retrieved from obscurity a wide variety of such “framing specialists”:
worker-poets in nineteenth-century France who developed a distinct image of workers as a
class, “peasant intellectuals” in Tanzania, who organized social and political movements and
developed new critical discourses in the process, provincial journalists in late-colonial Java
who translated western liberal and socialist ideas into local models, indigenous activists in
Latin America and Muslim teachers and missionaries in Southeast Asian villages.4 These
1
David A. Snow and Robert D. Benford, “Master Frames and Cycles of Protest”, in Aldon D. Morris and Carol
McClurg Mueller (eds), Frontiers in Social Movement Theory (New Haven, CT, 1992), pp. 133-155. Doug
McAdam, John D. McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald, Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political
Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings (Cambridge [etc.], 1996).
2
Florencia E. Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (Berkeley, CA, 1995);
David Nugent, Modernity at the Edge of Empire: State, Individual, and Nation in the Northern Peruvian Andes,
1885-1935 (Stanford, CA, 1997).
3
Lenard R. Berlanstein, “Working with Language: The Linguistic Turn in French Labor History. A Review
Article”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 33 (1991), pp. 426-440; Edward F. Fischer, Cultural
Logics and Global Economics: Maya Identity in Thought and Practice (Austin, TX, 2001); Charles R. Hale,
“Cultural Politics of Identity in Latin America”, Annual Review of Anthropology, 26 (1997), pp. 567-590; Gareth
Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832-1982 (Cambridge, 1983);
Charles Tilly, Stories, Identities, and Political Change (Lanham, MD, 2002).
4
Jacques Rancire, The Nights of Labor: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France (Philadelphia,
PA, 1989); Steven Feierman, Peasant Intellectuals: Anthropology and History in Tanzania (Madison, WI, 1990);
Takashi Shiraishi, An Age in Motion: Popular Radicalism in Java, 1912-26 (Ithaca, NY, 1990); Kay B. Warren,
Indigenous Movements and Their Critics: Pan-Maya Activism in Guatemala (Princeton, NJ, 1998); Joanne
1
studies form a powerful incentive to look beyond the category of “traditional” intellectuals
(highly educated, urban, relatively autonomous in the political field) and to consider, as well,
the many other types of framing specialists who matter in periods of protest.
We invite contributors to address the following questions:
- Who are the people who venture in this ideological work, for whom do they speak, and
how do their views relate to the perceptions of the people they claim to represent (this
question may recall discussions on Gramsci’s “organic” intellectuals, “traditional” semi-
independent intellectuals, intellectual vanguards, and social-movement intellectuals). What
is their role in the emergence and socio-political activities of specific social movements?
- How do these popular intellectuals interact with other activist actors and their discourses,
within wider spheres of contentious politics which link local intellectuals to national and
international networks (and, for instance, to international ideologies of socialism, human
rights, or ethnic nationalism). How do these interactions affect the ideological frames they
develop and adopt, with what effect on the process and outcome of collective actions?
In broader terms: How were specific ideological perspectives or frames created and how
did these become widely shared? What is the historical interplay between ideology and
social action and how did this lead to what Michael Vester has called “cycles of learning”
by which social movements develop new strategies and ideas?5
- Since many popular protests target state authorities and try to appeal to state-supported
notions of rights and justice, how does the state react to, and influence, the work of framing
protest?
In the following, we suggest several related perspectives and themes to analyze these social
dynamics of framing protest:
1) Popular intellectuals within networks of interaction. Social movements consist of a
sustained series of interactions among a large number of relevant actors, in particular,
activists, supporters, and the object of the activists’ claims, but also “allies, competitors,
enemies, authorities, and multiple audiences”. 6 Framing activities are part of these
interactions. They concern “ideas forged in dialogue”. 7 As the main proponents of frame
analysis argue, frames are produced and altered through “the interpretive discussions and
debates that social movement actors engage in among each other”, but also in “the framing
contests that occur between movement actors and other parties within the movement field of
action, such as countermovements, adversaries, and even the media”. 8
Rappaport, Cumbe Reborn: An Andean Ethnography of History (Chicago, IL, 1994); Edward F. Fischer,
Cultural Logics and Global Economics: Maya Identity in Thought and Practice (Austin, TX, 2001); Robert W.
Hefner and Patricia Horvatich (eds), Islam in an Era of Nation-States: Politics and Religious Renewal in Muslim
Southeast Asia (Honolulu, 1997).
5
Michael Vester, Die Entstehung des Proletariats als Lernproces: Zur Sociologie der Arbeiterbewegung
(Frankfurt am Main, 1970).
6
Tilly, Stories, Identity, and Political Change, p. 88.
7
Anthony Milner, The Invention of Politics in Colonial Malaya: Contesting Nationalism and the Expansion of
the Public Sphere (Cambridge, 1994), p. 289.
8
David A. Snow and Robert D. Benford, “Mobilization Forum: Clarifying the Relationship between Framing and
Ideology”, Mobilization, 5 (2000), pp. 55-60, 56. See also Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, Social
Movements: A Cognitive Approach (University Park, PA, 1991)
2
2) The cultural dynamics of contention involves considerable improvisation, adaptation, and
innovation, constrained by earlier established perceptions. The term “contentious
conversations” describes such interactions well.9 In the process, social boundaries are
redrawn, and identity categories and classifications presented in sharper relief, such as
“nation”, “ethnic identity”, and “class”. 10 Contention may involve the appropriation of
official state discourses and their use for anti-state goals. For instance, the Andean indigenous
movement which was headed by the so-called mensajeros apoderados (“empowered
messengers”) used colonial documents and concepts to resist intervention by the post-colonial
republican state.
3) The nature and effects of cultural brokerage. Popular intellectuals may tap into various
“cultural flows”, 11 connect different sets of ideas, develop these into new models, and
broadcast these through various networks of communication. For instance, historical and
anthropological research in Africa has highlighted the importance of “traditional” discourses
and cultural elements like witchcraft and dancing in the formulation of anti-colonial
discourses.12 Latin American scribes (tintilleros) fulfilled a necessary role in the relations
between indigenous communities and the central state in 19th century Latin America but, as
intellectual and political intermediaries between different spheres of society, their social and
political position could become quite ambiguous.13 It is therefore necessary to analyse the
evolution of the social and political position of these intermediaries in specific periods of
time.
4) New “languages of politics”. Intellectuals may produce discourses that provide others with
new conceptual space for articulating collective interests, identities, and claims. Socialist
intelligentsia in Asia, indigenista intellectuals in Latin America, Marxist students in Africa,
and Islamic religious reformists in the Muslim world, are among those groups who created
political and discursive spaces which could be used by popular collective actors to their own
advantage.14 For late-colonial Malaysia, for instance, Milner shows how liberal journalists and
pamphleteers, religious leaders and writers, and royal spokesmen, engaged in a contentious
ideological debate on the future of their society (what it should look like, how it should be
changed).15 In the process, they created a new political discourse which set the ideological
terms for subsequent political mobilization and collective action.
5) The interaction between popular intellectuals at local, regional, and (inter)national levels.
Various categories of actors may interpret the same movement and the same social changes in
radically different ways, but still find points of connection that motivate their cooperation. For
9
Tilly, Stories, Identity, and Political Change, p. 13. See also Javier Auyero, “The Judge, the Cop, and the
Queen of Carnival: Ethnography, Storytelling, and the (Contested) Meanings of Protest”, Theory and Society, 31
(2002), pp. 151-187.
10
Cf. Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly, Dynamics of Contention (New York, 2001)
11
Ulf Hannerz, Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning (New York, 1992).
12
Terence Ranger, Dance and Society in Eastern Africa, 1890-1970 (Berkeley, CA, 1975); Peter Geschiere, The
Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa (Charlottesville, VA, 1997); Jean
Comaroff and John Comaroff (eds), Modernity and its Malcontents. Ritual and Power in Postcolonial Africa
(Chicago, IL, 1993).
13
Michiel Baud, Intelectuales y sus utopías: Indigenismo y la imaginación de América Latina (Amsterdam, 2003)
14
For example, Hefner and Horvatich, Islam in an Era of Nation-States, and Warren, Indigenous Movements and
Their Critics.
15
Milner, Invention of Politics in Colonial Malaya.
3
instance, in the 1970s in a district in revolutionary Ethiopia, urban Marxist students gained
most support among evangelical Christians. Though the student vanguard was inspired by
“narratives of the Chinese and Russian revolutions” and the peasant vanguard by “stories of
previous Evangelical conversion”, they shared a master frame of “modernity”, “progress”, and
resistance against anything associated with “tradition”, which facilitated a connection between
the two groups.16
Within a social movement, top-level idea-specialists may provide the official movement
frame, but local organizers may adapt this frame to local perceptions and conditions, or may
challenge those parts that contradict their own perceived interests.17 Such differences in
perception may have unforeseen effects, including frictions, defections, and local activists
recruiting through a frame that does not at all fit the vision of the leaders.
16
Donald L. Donham, Marxist Modern: An Ethnographic History of the Ethiopian Revolution (Berkeley, CA,
1999), p. xvii.
17
James C. Scott, “Revolution in the Revolution: Peasants and Commissars”, Theory and Society, 7 (1979), pp.
97-134. Also, Rosanne Rutten, “High-Cost Activism and the Worker Household: Interests, Commitment, and the
Costs of Revolutionary Activism in a Philippine Plantation Region”, Theory and Society, 29 (2000), pp. 215-252.
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